How to Grep for Text in Files

Grep is a command-line utility that can search and filter text using a common regular expression syntax. It is so ubiquitous that the verb “to grep” has emerged as a synonym for “to search.” grep is a useful tool for finding all occurrences of a search term in a selection of files, filtering a log file or stream, or as part of a script or chain of commands.

This guide provides an overview of grep usage, a brief introduction to regular expression syntax, and practical examples.

Using Grep

This guide references recent versions of GNU grep, which are included by default in all images provided by Linode. It is also provided as part of the common base selection of packages provided in nearly all distributions of Linux-based operating systems.

The Grep Command

A basic grep command uses the following syntax:

grep "string" ~/threads.txt

The first argument to grep is a search pattern. The second (optional) argument is the name of a file to be searched. The above sequence will search for all occurrences of “string” in the ~/threads file.

If you want to search multiple files, the -r flag enables recursive searching through a directory tree:

grep -r "string" ~/thread/

When used on a specific file, grep only outputs the lines that contain the matching string. When run in recursive mode, grep outputs the full path to the file, followed by a colon, and the contents of the line that matches the pattern. Patterns in grep are, by default, basic regular expressions. If you need a more expressive regular expression syntax, grep is capable of accepting patterns in alternate formats with the following flags:

Output only the matching segment of each line, rather than the full contents of each matched line.

-n

Print the line number of each matched line.

-C 2

Show 2 (or another number of) context lines in addition to the matched line.

In addition to reading content from files, grep can read and filter text from standard input. The output of any command or stream can be piped to the grep command. Then, grep filters this output according to the match pattern specified and outputs only the matching lines. For instance, given the following command:

ls --help | grep "dired"

This filters the output of the ls command’s help text and looks for appearances of “dired”, and outputs them to standard out:

-D, --dired generate output designed for Emacs' dired mode

Regular Expression Overview

While straightforward pattern matching is sufficient for some filtering tasks, the true power of grep lies in its ability to use regular expressions for complex pattern matching. Most characters in regular expressions match with input data literally; however, there are some sequences that carry special significance:

Symbol

Result

.

Matches any character.

*

Matches zero or more instances of the preceding character.

+

Matches one or more instances of the preceding character.

[]

Matches any of the characters within the brackets.

()

Creates a sub-expression that can be combined to make more complicated expressions.

|

OR operator; (www|ftp) matches either “www” or “ftp”.

^

Matches the beginning of a line.

$

Matches the end of the line.

\

Escapes the following character. Since . matches any character, to match a literal period you would need to use \..

Filtering Logs with Grep

One popular use of grep is to extract useful information from system logs:

In this command, grep filters an Apache access log for all lines that begin with an IP address, followed by a number of characters, a space and then the characters 200 (where 200 represents a successful HTTP connection). The -c option outputs only a count of the number of matches. To get the output of the IP address of the visitor and the path of the requested file for successful requests, omit the -c flag:

The curly brackets specify the number of instances of the pattern. {1,3} requires that the previous character occur at least once, but no more than three times. The character class [0-9] will match against one or more numeric digits. You can also generate similar output but report on unsuccessful attempts to access content:

The following command generates a list of all IP addresses that have attempted to connect to your web server. Using the -o option, only the matching strings are sent to standard output. This output is filtered through the utility uniq with the pipe operator (|) to filter out duplicate entries:

grep can filter the output of commands such as tail -F to provide real-time monitoring of specific log events:

tail ~/.procmail/procmail.log -F | grep "Subject"

In this case, tail follows the ~/procmail/procmail.log file. This output is passed to grep, which filters the stream and prints only lines that contain the string “Subject”.

Filtering Commands with Grep

grep can be used to filter long help files. This command filters the tar help text to more efficiently find the options for dealing with bzip files:

tar --help | grep "bzip"

grep is also useful for filtering the output of ls when listing the contents of directories with a large number of files:

ls /usr/lib | grep "xml"

Grep Compressed Files with zgrep

zgrep command functions identically to the grep command above; however, it adds the ability to run grep operations on files that have been compressed with gzip without requiring an extra compression and decompression step. To search an older compressed log:

zgrep operations take longer than standard grep operations because of the additional overhead of reading the compressed files.

More Information

You may wish to consult the following resources for additional information on this topic. While these are provided in the hope that they will be useful, please note that we cannot vouch for the accuracy or timeliness of externally hosted materials.